Substation Onyx

About this time last year, I was coming off of a whirlwind of activities in regards to music and music production. My debut solo album garnered way more attention than I was prepared to handle, The Jump To Nowhere recording sessions had come to a close and mixing/mastering that album was in full swing, and I was yearning to do a short-term writing project where I could go from an idea and a few riffs to a finished song. The end result was my single “Breather”, which from sketch to mastered song took about a week. Here’s some of the gear that helped it come together.

Friedman BE Mini

This is the ONLY amplifier heard on the entirety of the song. No VSTs, no reamping, no modelers. I recorded directly into this thing for all guitars. The reason was simple: I wanted to prove that I could and still have the song sound great.

This solid-state amplifier sits in a very odd space even just as a commercial product. While it lacks several features that would prevent it from ever being a mainstay amplifier for live use (no clean channel, non-switchable FX loop, relatively quiet solid-state power amplifier), I had already been finding small roles for it within my music (the guitar solos for “Uh Oh, Collapsed Dynacoil” and “To Nowhere” from The Jump To Nowhere are built on the BE Mini preamplifier feeding a 4×12 cabinet impulse response). It’s definitely more than just a practice amp, as its diminutive size and laptop charger power supply would incline one to believe. “Breather” was my chance to push this amplifier to take on as many tones and roles as it could and test its limits.

“Breather” distances itself from most my songs because stylistically, it’s more rock than metal, and so elements of the song work together to reflect that. I was less stringent in getting my guitars to stick exactly to the metronome, entirely different drum samples were used, the mix is far less surgical… the list goes on and on, but using the hot-rodded British BE Mini voicing for all guitars (as opposed to my typical high-gain American sound) is one of the most important pieces in getting this song to stand apart.

PRS Mark Holcomb SE

The versatility of this guitar is highlighted on this song, as it’s the only guitar I used! The Holcomb SE includes dual humbuckers with a coil-split option, allowing for a total of six voicings, four of which are heard on “Breather”. The BE Mini possesses only a single (distorted) channel, so switching in between pickups was the most powerful way of changing the electric guitar tone. This can be heard most drastically going in between a parallel, split-coil sound on the backbeat-heavy verse riff and the mid-focused bridge humbucker tone on the choruses.

EarthQuaker Devices Plumes

No rig of mine is complete without an overdrive. The recording session for “Breather” took place about a month before the concept of the Opaque Drive would come to be (with a playable unit a half-year away), so I used one of the more trusted devices in my room. I don’t hide my distaste for the screamer-style overdrive, but there’s no denying their utility. EQD’s Plumes improves significantly on the standard Tube Screamer by offering you a couple different clipping options, a little extra range on the tone knob, and a LOT more volume. I tend just to set the switch to position 2 (clipping against the op-amp power rails, the most open-sounding option) and adjust knobs so that the pedal itself imparts minimal distortion on the signal and pushes the amplifier a little harder without totally slamming it. On the Plumes, the “boost” level sweet spot is just below 10 o’clock.

GetGood Drums One Kit Wonder: Modern Fusion

The drum sound of “Breather” is far from my standard drum sound. In comparison to the sounds I usually go for, these samples featured a much smaller room, a less-open hi-hat, larger diameter cymbals, and clear tom heads instead of my usual coated ones.